Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Health Metrics on the County Level

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation has made an interactive map available that allows viewers to explore health trends in the United States down to the county level. Included in these trends are data on life expectancy (for your selected geography during the span 1985 to 2010), hypertension (2001 to 2009), obesity (2001 to 2011) and physical activity (2001 to 2011).

The first step to accessing this information is to decide which of those metrics you'd like to see mapped and deciding if you'd like to see it for males or females...



Next, you can type in the name of the county you'd like to get the data for...



This will bring up a map which, if you hover above the county you are interested in, shows a pop-up box with data from the FIRST year of the cycle...in the case of life expectancy, for example, the data is preset to 1985 information...







Across the bottom of the map is a sliding timeline you can use to set the year to that which interests you, or if you'd like to see how the data has changed over time, you can click the "play" button at the end of the timeline to see a transitional view of the trends over time...


The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation was launched with the goal of providing an unbiased, evidence-based picture of global health trends and determinants to inform the work of a broad range of organizations, policymakers, researchers, and funders.